List Price: $2,199,000
Sale Price: $2,000,000
Sale Date: April 23rd
Built in 1941 in the Woodlands neighborhood on Hinsdale’s east side, this 18-room home sold as a short sale. Its original asking price was $3.4 million

The Properties: The homes pictured here are three of the nine Hinsdale houses that sold for $1 million or more between April 15th and April 29th. That’s up from four sold last year in the same two-week period and just one house sold in that time frame in 2008.

“It’s probably been 18 months since Hinsdale was this busy,” says Chris Crawford,a Sotheby’s agent who represented the $2-million short sale (where a bank approves a sale at less than the seller owes on the mortgage) and the $1.675-million sale pictured here. (He also represented one of the nine other sales) The spark for this recent rush of high-end sales, he says, is that “sellers and [real-estate agents] are pricing more appropriately now, and these buyers have done their homework; they recognize when the prices are right.”

Indeed, in the case of the $1.675-million house sale, more than one potential buyer detected when the home’s price got to the right point. While the home, with its broad front porch and cupola, had first gone on the market at $2.5 million, when its price got down to $1,749,000, it became the subject of a bidding war among multiple buyers.

Two of the other recent high-end sales not pictured are:

• a 14-room house with a fieldstone façade and steep gables that was completed in 2008 and sold for $1,760,000;
• and a nine-year-old home with 11 rooms on the northern edge of town near the Fullersburg Woods Forest Preserve that sold for its asking price: $1.1 million.

Price Points: Most of the homes in Hinsdale’s recent sales blitz had first hit the market a while back, with markedly higher asking prices. A 16-year-old home on Ninth Street near Washington Park in southwest Hinsdale, for instance, sold on April 27th for $1.105 million. Its asking price at the time of the sale was $1.1999 million, but it had originally gone on the market at $1.749 million. At the lower price, it was “absolutely a good deal,” says Sally La Crosse, the Brush Hill agent who represented the buyers of the house. The buyers already lived in Hinsdale, she says, and had watched “the market here get corrected” before buying. They are not yet identified in public records of the sale.

Listing Agent (on two of the pictured homes): Chris Crawford of Sotheby’s International Realty; 630-323-4800 or chris.crawford@sothebysrealty.com